We are Utah adoptees who have spent years working with Congress to close a gap in federal law that denies citizenship to some international adoptees solely based on their age. We were adopted as infants and young children into Utah families.
Our American parents chose us to be their family. When we joined our families, we became sons, daughters, brothers and sisters in every legal, religious and personal sense. We were given American names, homes and a promise that we belonged equally with our parents’ biological children.
Some of us were sealed to our parents in Latter-day Saint temples, a covenant our parents understood to mean there was no distinction between an adopted child and a biological one. Federal law has not honored that promise.
The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 secured automatic citizenship for internationally adopted children, but it excluded those who were already 18 when the law took effect. As a result, older adoptees can hold different citizenship rights than a younger sibling raised in the very same American family, based on nothing more than their birth date.
We support the Protect Adoptees and American Families, or PAAF, Act, S2923, which provides a path to citizenship simply by proof of legal adoption by a U.S. citizen — the same way a biological child’s citizenship rests on proof of birth in the U.S. It puts older international adoptees on equal footing with their biological siblings through a simple administrative document review. This is the same process established by the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 for younger international adoptees.
The PAAF is also bipartisan because adoption is not a partisan issue. In 2022, Utah’s Legislature passed a resolution, signed by Gov. Spencer Cox, unanimously agreeing that international adoptees deserved citizenship. Rep. Blake Moore, Sen. John Curtis and Rep. Burgess Owens have co-sponsored versions of the PAAF in previous Congresses.
Since 2021, we have spoken with Sen. Mike Lee’s office every legislative session, urging him to co-sponsor the PAAF. We shared real stories of Utah families who never knew their adopted children weren’t U.S. citizens.
That is why we were surprised and confused when Lee introduced a competing bill, the Citizenship for International Adoptees, or CIA, Act, S5191, at the urging of Holt International. Holt has no office in Utah and will not be impacted by the CIA Act. But we adoptees will.
The CIA Act is described as providing automatic citizenship. It does not. It largely repeats the existing naturalization process, requiring older adoptees to pass a criminal and moral character review that their own younger siblings never had to pass. It offers no protection while an application is pending, no pause on deportation, no deadline for a decision.
Adoptees were brought to America as babies and children for one reason — to become sons and daughters of American parents.
The adoptees needing citizenship are not lawyers; they are unprotected and vulnerable. When trust is misplaced, the consequences will fall on the adoptees alone, not on the officials or organizations who described the bill as safe. We cannot stay silent on legislation that promises citizenship on its face but instead could result in deportation.
Over past decades, dozens of international adoptees have already been deported under the current naturalization process that the CIA mimics for old minor offenses despite fulfilling every court-ordered requirement. They are separated from family and sent back to their country of origin with no tools to survive. And the CIA explicitly excludes deported adoptees, cementing the status of adoptees as unequal members of their own American families.
A biological child or a younger adoptee in the same circumstances would never face deportation, which raises serious equal-protection concerns. Requiring an adoptee to submit to a discretionary process, even if they can prove their legal adoption, is the opposite of automatic.
Holt’s support for the CIA Act warrants its own scrutiny. South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in March 2025 that the country’s overseas adoption program, run through a small number of agencies including Holt, violated adoptees’ human rights, citing falsified abandonment paperwork and bypassed parental consent as documented practices across the system.
The Associated Press and the PBS series “Frontline” separately documented specific cases tied to Holt in which adoption records did not match birth families’ accounts. An organization facing that level of public and government scrutiny should not be shaping citizenship rights of the very adoptees it placed.
We are asking Lee to withdraw his sponsorship of the CIA Act and support the PAAF Act instead. We believe the PAAF can pass because of one very simple truth: Adoptees were brought to America as babies and children for one reason — to become sons and daughters of American parents. Citizenship should follow from that truth alone.
As a senior Senate Judiciary Committee member, Lee has significant power to shape how Congress corrects this gap in our law.
Utah values faith, family and the permanence of family bonds. A bill that leaves children of the same family with unequal citizenship is not consistent with those values. When our parents adopted us, we did not become temporary members of our families. We became their children.